Stepping Stones Training Package -- How does it work?

How

HOW does Stepping Stones work?

Introduction
Stepping Stones workshops are like a journey, or like a path of stones across a river. All the sessions use a participatory approach of non-formal learning through shared discussions and accompanying creative activities. All the exercises are based on participants' own experiences. Role play and drawing exercises enable everyone to take part: no literacy is needed, so everyone relies on their own experiences equally. Participants discuss their experiences, act them out, analyse them, explore and consider alternative outcomes, develop strategies for achieving them and then rehearse these together and reflect on them in a safe, supportive group.

People feel safe because most sessions take place in groups of their own gender and age, with facilitators of the same gender and similar age. Participants also enjoy the sessions because there is a lot of fun and laughter as well as the more challenging work.

On this web page you will find:

	a description of the "fission and fusion" structure of the Stepping Stones workshops
	an explanation of the importance of working with ordinary community members who are not expected to have any particular skills or qualifications before they join the workshops. Participants are given skills in the workshop to do their own research: to explore and analyse their existing experiences and then to rehearse and reflect on new ways of behaving
	a discussion of the importance of the creative arts in active participatory learning, based on participants' own experiences. These experiential learning activities include role-play, drawings, tableaux, song and dance
	having fun - having games and laughter as well as being serious and feeling sad

Workshop Structure

Stepping Stones was developed between 1993 and 1995, mainly in Uganda, where we worked with a rural community, comprising Muslims, Protestants and Catholics, all living together in the same village. The package was designed in response to the vulnerability of most women, men and young people in decision-making regarding sexual behaviour, through men's gendered patriarchal domination of women and older people's generally repressive attitudes towards youth.

Thus the package was designed from the outset to work both simultaneously and separately with older men, younger men, older women and younger women in the community, in order to give them all private time and space in their own self-defined gender- and age-based peer groups. Here they could explore and analyse their own situations for themselves, without threat of domination or ridicule from others.

The diagram shown below explains how the original package was formed, with peer groups meeting by themselves for several sessions (defined by letters) and then meeting regularly in carefully facilitated plenary sessions to share and compare their own discussions, analyses and learning experiences, in a mutually respectful way. Thus the whole original workshop, which lasted for 18 sessions, spread over at least 9 weeks, was designed as a "fission and fusion" model, starting with, recognising and validating different experiences and perspectives and then enabling those to be brought together to find common ground and agreement.

The very format of the peer groups gives separate, equally recognised space to the different groups. Then the structure of the several plenary sessions, which bring all the peer groups together to share and compare what they have been doing, builds and steadily reinforces mutual care and respect between the different groups, across the generations as well as across the genders. The combination of these two processes, challenging gender and age norms together, lends a particular strength to the effectiveness of this work.

Working with Ordinary Community Members
It is important to recognise that Stepping Stones depends entirely for its success on its grounding in local knowledge, locally defined current and historical context and local experience of that context, explored and analysed by local participants themselves, during the course of the workshop. Without this locally specific basis from the outset, the package would not work, and certainly would not travel.
Therefore, one key to Stepping Stones' success is that it has been widely adapted and translated by many different organisations, mainly so far in Africa and Asia, but also in Russia and in Latin America.

Firstly, Stepping Stones views all the people involved, both old and young, as actors central to their own lives, rather than as empty vessels for our endless health education messages to fill.

Click here for a diagram of the "petrol pump" model of behaviour change

Throughout the workshop process they are conducting their own research on their own lives, exploring and analysing how local historically and culturally constructed contexts have shaped the way in which they identify themselves and relate to others around them. The facilitator who guides each peer group through the exercises in each session, guides this exploration.

The optional workshop video shows some examples of this.

It is important that the process of change is given the opportunity to happen at multiple levels. It is virtually impossible for individuals - especially women and young people - to change the way they relate to others by themselves, without the support of their peers, their family and their wider community.

Men also face huge peer pressure to conform to the norms of their peers. If they decide, for instance, to help with household tasks, or not to hit their wives, they can be jeered at and shunned by their peers. This is why the Stepping Stones process is structured to promote changes in attitudes and actions at multiple levels of the community, simultaneously, as shown below.

In this diagram, the sizes, shapes and strengths of these circles will vary with the gender of "me", and with context and over time.

The programme offers all the participants the skills to explore and analyse their own situations in which they find themselves and those around them, and then to rehearse and reflect on new ways of behaving themselves and relating to others, within the safety of their own separate gender- and age-based peer groups, before going public with these new ideas.

The optional workshop video shows some examples of this.

Using the creative arts
The skills that participants are taught help them use their own experiences to look with new eyes. Each facilitator helps the group to create experiential learning activities, which include role-play, discussions, tableaux and drawing exercises, to open up new ways of thinking about the world and their places in it. These exercises draw heavily on the creativity of the performing arts in us, using songs and dance also to break up the sessions and build on the learning. No skills in reading or writing are required during the workshops, so no-one who has little formal education is disadvantaged in this process.

During these exercises, the men have to act at times as women, or as young people, and vice-versa. They learn to see how life feels from these different perspectives of greater or lesser power than they normally experience in their own lives. They learn how both anger and aggression can not only harm others greatly, but can also be just as self-destructive as can passivity and submission.

All participants, old or young, male or female, can start to dare to take control of their own lives rather than feeling that their lives are in control of them. They learn to swim against the current, and to find the stepping stones across the river of life, which can and should be full of pleasure as well as pain, if only they have the means to find the pleasure for themselves.

The optional workshop video shows some examples of these activities.

Making sessions fun and funny as well as serious and, at times, sad
It's also important to make the sessions funny, fun and enriching as well as challenging and painful. The main exercises of each session are sandwiched between warm-up games and other fun exercises, which often reflect in a humorous way the main serious learning process of the session. Participants are then easily able to remember the greater learning processes by referring to the fun games which made them laugh.

See the optional workshop video for an illustration of this.

Stepping Stones is part of the Strategies for Hope series

This web site kindly funded by the Exchange Programme

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thanks to Petra Röhr-Rouendaal for her illustrations

web site designed by Alice Welbourn with the assistance of Quay Press